In the seven years Katie Holmes spent trapped in her heavily
guarded relationship with Tom Cruise, we hardly knew her. The doe-eyed actress
with the steely-soft smile landed nary a choice role of note during her
high-profile TomKat years, while fans watched her disappear behind a prim bob
and a wearied Mona Lisa smile as the paparazzi flashes
popped.

That’s why, when she split from Cruise in 2012 after nearly six years of
marriage, the world exhaled on her behalf. But when the newly single Holmes
returned to the acting game, she notched mostly disappointing results.
Now—finally—Holmes is rebuilding her movie career with her best starring
role in a decade. Even better: her new pro-psychiatry film is a giant middle
finger to Cruise’s beloved Church of Scientology.

Cruise’s devotion to Scientology set off alarm bells back in 2005 when he
blasted Brooke Shields for taking antidepressants to battle post-partum
depression. Talking to Matt Lauer on The Today Show, he became visibly agitated
decrying the practice of psychiatric medicine. “You don’t know the history
of psychiatry,” he insisted in front of fans who’d come to see him promote his
sci-fi blockbuster War of the Worlds. “I do.”

The battle cry earned a sharp rebuke from the American Psychiatric
Association. “It is irresponsible for Mr. Cruise to use his movie publicity tour
to promote his own ideological views and deter people with mental illness from
getting the care they need,” said APA president Dr Steven Sharfstein.

But the Church’s violent opposition to shrinkdom and generally accepted
psychiatric treatment of mental illness dated back decades, of course.
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard hated “psychs” and insisted they were shady
and unethical. Controversial Scientology leader David Miscavige reportedly made
the organization’s anti-psychiatry agenda plain in a 1995 address in Copenhagen:
“Objective one—place Scientology at the absolute center of society. Objective
two—eliminate psychiatry in all its forms.” And the film Going Clear
claimed that Cruise’s first wife, Nicole Kidman, was labeled a “Potential
Trouble Source” because her father was a renowned psychologist in his native
Australia.

So it’s not hard to guess that Holmes’s ex and his Scientology
crew probably won’t give rave reviews to the new indie
drama Touched With Fire, about two bipolar poets who meet and fall
in love while stuck in the same psychiatric ward.

Given the reach and fearsome reputation of the Church, it’s no small gesture
to see Holmes, newly freed of the shadow of Scientology, taking on a film whose
messages include an unequivocal endorsement of psychiatry—let alone one with
such a clear message. The 37-year-old stars as Carla, a bipolar poet who checks
herself into a psych ward during a particularly intense episode. There, she
meets another bipolar patient, Marco (Luke Kirby), who goes by the name “Luna”
and believes he’s from another planet.

Together they ponder the link between mental illness and creative artistry,
fall in love, reject their meds, make manic art and love, and send their
concerned families into a panic as they try to make a life together sans
treatment.

It all comes crashing down as their lives-off-meds spiral out of control, one
mania-induced crisis after another. Author and psychologist Kay Redfield
Jamison, who penned the book that writer-director Paul Dalio based the film on,
even makes a cameo as herself advocating better bipolar living through
medication.

“I gained a greater empathy for people who are struggling with mental
illness,” Holmes told More last month. “Before the movie, I’d hear something
about it and think, ‘Wow. But that’s over there.’ Unfortunately, we’re quick to
judge, especially in this day of social media and the Internet—which I think is
an ugly-maker. Everybody looks ugly when they’re on the Internet. But I wouldn’t
want to live a flat life, with no pain.”

Holmes has played relatively nice and NDA-safe so far in her post-divorce
interviews, deathly careful to focus on motherhood and positive messaging rather
than tabloid-fodder Cruise chatter. On the promo tour for Touched With
Fire, she’s been refreshingly alive—channeling
Beyoncé, the Queen of self-empowered fierceness, and boxing our Ryan
Reynolds on The Tonight Show while playing a round of Musical
Beers. It’s as if the mojo she lost is finally being replenished. Hopefully that
carries through in her creative choices from this point on, too. To see where
they went astray, let’s rewind through the last decade in Katie Holmes, Movie
Star.

Holmes, solidly successful off a series-long tenure on Dawson’s Creek,
was working her way through the start of a promising career-making run when she
began dating Cruise, her onetime celebrity crush in the summer of 2005. In her
life B.C. (Before Cruise), her varied filmography showed range, ambition, and a
daring indie spirit, from Go to Pieces of
April to Batman Begins and beyond. But while her turn
as a morally flexible reporter in Thank You For Smoking drew
raves, it also marked the end of the beginning for Holmes.

Holmes has made a point to say that her marriage to Cruise never prevented
her from working, per se. But said work during the TomKat years tells a dire
story. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, her 2006-2012 period is a telling collection of
rotten green splats and buffer years of understandable inactivity—one in 2006
when she stepped away from the limelight to give birth to daughter Suri, and
another when she split from Cruise and the Church of Scientology in
2012.

Holmes’s Cruise years onscreen, meanwhile, are bookended by two of her
highest-profile duds. Start with Mad Money and you trace a path
through indies that fell flat (The Romantics; The Extra Man; The Son of No
One), to the only Adam Sandler blemish on her resume: Jack &
Jill. Hey, maybe Holmes has a forgivable excuse for making bad choices back
then. What’s Al Pacino’s?

The rebuilding period hasn’t been without its hiccups. Holmes gave Broadway a
shot but mostly stuck to the screen. Until Touched With Fire, not a
single one of Holmes’ recent films could be considered either a critical or
commercial success. She’d eased herself back into the game in the Chekhov-update
ensemble Days and Nights, but despite packing serious indie-bait
talent with William Hurt, Ben Whishaw, and Allison Janney among the cast, the
film came and went in the fall of 2014 earning a blistering 0 percent
Tomatometer rating. It was, and still is, the worst-reviewed film of Holmes’s
career.

Holmes had been chased her entire career by the ghost of Joey Potter,
everyone’s favorite girl-next-door. Being publicly stuck in a celebrity marriage
to a global megastar defined by his wacky outbursts and perennially “on”
charisma had dimmed Holmes’s spunky persona. Audiences were barely seeing her on
the mainstream screen as Holmes opted for smaller projects. She dipped her toes
back in the Hollywood studio world in 2014 with a supporting turn in The
Giver, but even that wannabe YA lit blockbuster was a box office
disappointment.

Later that year, Holmes mixed it up as a vigilante schoolteacher in the black
comedy-thriller Miss Meadows. Her character, described as a “Pulp Fiction
Mary Poppins,” was all about defying expectations; even the poster was The
Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag meets Serial Mom—Holmes, in a retro dress
and Mary Janes, coldly pointing a pistol out of frame. While critics
praised her performance, they weren’t so keen on the film itself, which was
relegated to a limited release.

In 2015, Holmes’s career approach seemed to shift. She appeared with Helen
Mirren and Reynolds in the drama Woman In Gold. More significantly, she
helmed, produced, and starred in her own directorial debut, All We Had,
about a single mother and her 13-year-old daughter. Through it all, television
had been pretty good to the Dawson’s Creek alum; now again, it
gave her some of her best opportunities as an actor. She landed a Season 3
recurring role on Showtime’s edgy drama Ray Donovan, flexing rarely
seen muscles as a master manipulator. After starring as Jackie Kennedy in the
2011 mini-series The Kennedys, Holmes reprises the role—this time,
as Jackie O.—in Reelz’s upcoming follow-up, The Kennedys After
Camelot, which she will also direct.

It’s that spark and spirit—low-key taking on Scientology
without taking on Scientology in movies like Touched
With Fire, tackling surprising characters against type, and seizing control
of her own destiny behind the camera—that we’d like to see more of as we enter a
new age of Katie Holmes.

“With age I’ve gained confidence,” she told More after shooting All We
Had, relishing in the newfound power of directing—and directing herself. “I
understand the kind of stories I want to tell. I have more experience in the
business. I feel more certain.”